


seeing eye to eye

by essektheylyss (midnightindigo)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Family Drama, Gen, I just need beau and essek to talk about their family nonsense okay, Religious Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23886037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightindigo/pseuds/essektheylyss
Summary: Seeing Essek on his own? It's easy to see him as a fluke, especially when he acts so aloof from the rest of his culture. But seeing him with his family... Beau is uncomfortably familiar growing up with that kind of environment.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Essek Thelyss
Comments: 18
Kudos: 287





	seeing eye to eye

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't sure how to show how I see Deirta Thelyss, and finally realized that it's probably easiest to see through Beau's eyes. I know I say this every other fic but... the projection in this. Oh my god.

They are not expecting the familiar mantle when they arrive beneath the Lucid Bastion and traipse loudly through the halls, but they run across him almost immediately, standing a ways ahead in the corridor.

“Essek!” Jester calls, and Beau wants to hiss at her to shush, that they don’t necessarily want to keep advertising their connection to the man who—they now know—had not a small hand in orchestrating the war’s inception, no matter what his true intentions were. But when he turns, his eyes tight and tired, and she spots the two other drow with him, the words die in her throat. 

The familial resemblance is striking. She has never met the woman who gives them an almost… eerie smile, as she meets their gazes. It’s not an eeriness that she thinks Jester notices—in fact, she’s not sure that anyone else would recognize that kind of smile, but it’s the smile that she’s seen her own mother wear too often to not pick out on instinct. The smile that says, _“Everything is perfect. Isn’t everything perfect?”_

When that’s what you’re spoon-fed for so long, it’s hard to believe it, and yet it’s so hard to forget.

And the other man there, in uniform, is somewhere in between—he doesn’t greet them with the same sharpness as Essek’s usual scowl, but his curious look still holds a distance. He and Essek are nearly identical, though his hair is pinker and longer, pulled into a long braid to keep it out of his face. 

Essek’s face does soften even as it falls when he turns at the sound, and that too is a look she knows well. Caring for your friends and wanting them interacting with your family are two very different impulses, ones that very rarely go hand in hand.

She envies Jester, sometimes, for how willing she is to share her mother with them. Beau doesn’t even want to interact with her own family herself. Having them meet her friends was… horrible.

For the first time since that night on the boat, she thinks she might understand Essek a little better, and his family didn’t even need to speak a word for her to see it.

“Hey, Essek,” she says as they reach the small group, and wonders if she’s the only person who’s put together what’s happening right now. But Caduceus is rather more… attentive than normal, suddenly, and Caleb is peering between them like he’s putting it together. But she’s the one who adds, “Who’s this?”

From the way he meets her eyes, narrowing his gaze just slightly, she knows he knows that she’s already figured it out, but she just raises her eyebrows, daring him to play the game. One clever rich kid who hates their family to another. 

“This is the Umavi of Den Thelyss,” he says stiffly, gesturing to the woman, whose clothing is as regal as his own. “Mother, this is the Mighty Nein.”

“Your gown is _beautiful!_ You must shop at the same place as the Bright Queen,” Jester says, her whisper not as subtle as she might like. Beau can never tell if that’s intentional or not. Jester’s not an easy person to evaluate, at least not for her.

Essek right now? She can read him like a fucking book.

But the Umavi of Den Thelyss just smiles graciously, the image of perfection, and she wonders what it must be like to have achieved that. “We wear similar clothing, for ceremonial purposes. Our queen is unmatched in style, though. Please, call me Deirta.” 

And then she takes Jester’s hand and squeezes it, a friendly gesture that makes Beau want to vomit, it’s so saccharine. She glances at Essek again, who is boring holes into her with his eyes. 

Oh yes. They understand each other perfectly, all of a sudden.

“And I’m sure Essek has mentioned Verin,” Deirta smiles, and gestures to the man in uniform. He looks young, in comparison, even younger than Essek, with an eagerness to his straight posture. 

“I don’t believe Essek has mentioned Verin,” Caleb mentions, and Beau resists the urge to smirk. 

“I am Essek’s brother,” Verin says, and any stiffness she might’ve caught at first in his expression vanishes as the attention turns to him, smiling brightly at them all. 

“He was just returning to Bazzoxan,” Deirta says, and smiles at Essek again, and in that expression she can see the tightening of her lips, just enough for someone looking to notice. “Essek, you’ve never mentioned your brother to your friends?” The word friends feels like it’s not quite what she means, and Beau catches the second question there— _I thought you trusted this group?_

“Essek is always very focused on the the task at hand,” Beau offers. She remembers before she’d given up playing her parents’ games, before she’d reached her rebellious phase, and wonders if Essek is just starting to get to that point. Essek’s expression doesn’t change, a perfect mask of numbness.

“That sounds like Essek.” Verin’s laugh is teasing, almost cruel, but the two brothers share a different look.

Gods, she could write a book on implicit communications for expositors solely based off this conversation. Dairon is a great spy, but there’s really nothing like growing up in the kind of family that deals in this kind of speech. It might as well be its own language.

Luckily, she’s fluent.

“Bazzoxan?” she asks, shifting to look directly at Verin, and he nods.

“Yes, I am an officer there. Guarding the Umbra Gates.”

“We’re… very familiar.” Behind her, she can feel Yasha shift her weight from foot to foot.

“I am aware. I heard you came through some time ago. Did you find our little village pleasant?” His smile is sharp, his voice jovial, and she thinks he’s using a bit of bravado to survive this conversation. Another thing she’s familiar with. It’s a different kind of posturing than Essek’s aloof approach or his fucking floating, but it is a defense mechanism all the same. 

“Yes, we stayed at the Ready Room,” Fjord offers. “It was very nice.”

Verin laughs again, and it’s strange to see such a different expression on features very like Essek’s. “It’s very quaint, isn’t it? Not much in the way of supplies that way. We make do well enough with what we have. Mother wouldn’t like it much.”

“You’ve never been to Bazzoxan?” Veth frowns.

“No, no,” Deirta laughs, one hand rubbing Verin’s shoulder… fondly? That one is difficult to interpret, even for Beau. Something between fondness and condescension. “Verin is very brave, just like his father.”

Ah. Verin, it would seem his mother feels, is playing at being an adult. Verin smiles back, a bit of the razor of Essek’s sharpness in his eyes now, but he accepts whatever compliment he’s just been given.

“I should return now—my superiors are waiting for me to check in,” he says, and gives them a slight nod of his head.

“Next time you’re in town you should come over for dinner!” Jester offers, and Beau hopes to Ioun that that happens, purely for how funny it’d be to watch Essek squirm.

Verin grins, and it’s the first genuine expression he’s given since they met him. Not that he didn’t mean the other smiles he offered—just that he meant something else underneath. “I would love to.” And he beams at Essek. Beau knows very well what a person looks like when they’re pointedly not rolling their eyes. “Mother, it was lovely to see you,” he says, and kisses her on the cheek. She sweeps her arms around him, hugging him tightly for a long minute.

“I love you. Stay safe.”

“I will, Mother.”

He waits for a moment before she finally lets go, and he waves brightly before he turns to walk back toward the teleportation room. 

“Essek, you wanna walk us back to the Xhorhaus?” she asks once Verin’s confident shoulders have disappeared around the next corner. “We can fill you in on what we’ve been up to?”

He stumbles over his breath as he turns back to his mother. “Oh, I think we were needed—“

“I need to speak with Quana before I return home,” she says, and pats his arm fondly. “I can get home just fine from here, dear. You go along with them.”

It’s that same condescension—Essek might be an adult by all legal and biological standards, but he’s still a child in his mother’s eyes. It’d be cute if Beau didn’t know how fucked it actually was, having your parents treat you like they know best even after you’re a grown up.

Oh, yeah. That alone makes her skin crawl, and suddenly she very much wants to get out of this conversation. She jerks her head. “Yeah, and we really gotta go make sure our housekeeper didn’t steal all the fine china, you know.”

Deirta smiles at her as well, and she wonders how much of a child she sees Beau as. She has no tangible reason to want to punch the Umavi of Den Thelyss in her sweet smiley face, but her fists itch at her sides all the same. “Of course, you run along. You all should come over for dinner, sometime. We would love to have you.”

Caleb has yet to smile through this conversation, and she wonders if he can pick up on all of this weird bullshit. “We would be honored.”

“Excellent—Essek, perhaps you can arrange that?” Essek nods mutely. “Lovely, then let me know. It was wonderful to finally meet all of Essek’s friends.” She grips Jester’s hand again, the closest person to her, and even Jester seems slightly taken aback. “I’m so glad to have you around.”

And before anyone can give a goodbye, she sweeps away down the hall. 

Essek doesn’t speak as he… _floats_ in the opposite direction. They follow hurriedly, but he is moving fast enough that even she has a hard time keeping up with breaking into a run, and it’s not until they’ve made it out of the Lucid Bastion that she manages to fall into step beside him and switches to Undercommon.

“You didn’t say your mom was… like that,” she mutters, and he looks mildly surprised at the change of language, but not enough to say something.

“Not here,” he hisses, and leads them back to the beacon of their tree-lit home.

Jester chatters away about TravelerCon, and how great it was, and a dragon turtle that Beau is almost surprised to remember, as distracted as she is. By the time the door chime trills and the door closes, she’s got so much energy that her words come fumbling out.

“You know, your mom’s got a really punchable face,” she says, and he raises an eyebrow even as his feet settle on the floor of the house. “I mean… she’s so… fucking pleasant.”

“Yes, she’s lovely,” Essek drawls, looking uniquely sarcastic, even for him, and she wants to shake him out of his numbness. She knows a defense mechanism when she sees it. 

She doesn’t know how to explain to the rest of the group, who are looking on curiously, so she returns to his native tongue so she doesn’t have to.

“How long’s she gonna treat you like a kid, then?” she asks, and his smile holds that same cruelty as his brother’s. For the first time, she realizes—it’s only self-deprecation, disguised as snark. 

“Ah, I imagine forever,” he smiles, and she thinks she’s suddenly glad that her parents’ punishment was sending her away. She’s glad that she did something worth being sent away. Essek has toed a line his entire life that has only landed him stuck here, firmly under his mother’s influence, and she thinks she’d probably want to kill herself if that was the case for her.

And she thinks about how he talked about his crimes being a death sentence, and suddenly wonders if somewhere in him that was the point—until they showed up and offered him a way out. 

She can’t say much for his methods, but he’s not the first person in his position to turn to criminal activity to escape the purview of their parents—not even the first person in this foyer.

Of course, she didn’t start a fucking war, but she also can’t say she’d have cared if she had, back when she was doing everything in her power to piss off her father.

“So, we are going to have dinner with your mother?” Caleb says, breaking into their discussion that is drawing confused looks from the rest of the group—well, those who are still standing around. Yasha and Caduceus have wandered off to the kitchen, and Fjord has politely bowed away from the conversation.

“I don’t think she’s punchable,” Jester pouts, hovering near Essek’s elbow. Essek smiles at her fondly, with enough condescension that now Beau knows where he learned it. “I thought she was nice.”

“She is very nice,” he agrees. “Shall we go to the study? You can tell me more about your travels?”

Nice is one way to put it, Beau thinks. She’s never been a fan of nice anyway. She doesn’t have any reason to punch Deirta Thelyss, and she knows she’d never get the chance, not without royally fucking any diplomatic relations they’ve got here and probably getting locked in the Zadash Reserve by Dairon. 

But gods, she thinks, watching Essek follow Jester and Veth and Caleb, watching his shoulders slump a bit as he releases all of the tension that comes with talking to parents who want to pretend like everything’s perfect, who expect you to play along, it’d be really fucking satisfying.

It’s only much later, after Jester and Veth have stopped prying him with questions about Verin, after Caleb has distracted the others with a new trick he’s learned to do with Frumpkin, after Beau passes Essek a cocktail that she promised him a long time ago, that she slips back into the drow language and presses the subject.

“So fucking glad my parents weren’t religious on top of the rest of the bullshit,” she says, and sips her drink casually, eyes watching the cat dance across the room, as enraptured as the rest of them. “That must suck.”

He stares at her. She doesn’t see it, focused as she is, but he does. “It does indeed, uh, suck.”

“Your mom seems like a nightmare to live with. Always perfect? Always nice? Never lets anyone have any feelings about anything without it being an insult to her flawless parenting?”

His low chuckle would’ve been a bark, if he’d been allowing himself a louder laugh. “I never even got so far as to pretend to have feelings. Verin tried a lot longer than I did.”

She stares at him now too. “Come on, man. You do have feelings. I’ve seen you have feelings. It’s not your fault you never felt like you could show them.”

The moment the words leave her mouth, she thinks this is probably exactly what she wished she’d been told that night they’d left her parents’ house. She wonders what might’ve happened if Essek had met her family, if he’d seen in them what she can see in his.

Because fuck, how much she wishes she could take Jester’s advice, wash herself clean of them, but they’re insidious, and she can’t wash away something on the inside.

He doesn’t answer, and it doesn’t matter, because she keeps talking anyway. “You remember when Caleb claimed I was having a syphilis flare-up? After the spell to change Veth didn’t work?”

What a simpler time that was—before they’d known about his crimes, before they’d ended a war. He nods. “Yes.”

“She was talking about that hag, and… turns out that’s the same hag my dad’s been feeding all of his happiness to for my entire life. My mom’s happiness.” She can barely choke out the words, even though saying them in a different language makes it hurt a little less. “My fucking happiness. So I guess… I guess maybe my dad is religious, after all.”

He looks at her, like he’s caught in a beam, illuminating all of the things that the shadows have kept hidden. “Then you understand what I mean when I say that obedience and belief are not the same thing.”

She absolutely does understand what that means. She’s never offered much of either, not since she got sick of playing their game, but she wonders if she’d have rebelled if she hadn’t found some small way out. Some kind of light to crawl towards, kicking and screaming. It wasn’t dignified enough for her father, and that was exactly her saving grace.

But Essek is as dignified as his mother is, as straight-backed and elegant. With all of this talk of the luxon, his mother’s standing among the dens, there was no light for him to reach for, so he never even tried. 

That’s not true, not exactly. But it was a false flicker of hope extending from the Assembly, something that could be so easily extinguished. They, on the other hand, are a fire, driving out the shadows in his eyes.

“How much pretending do you do?” she wonders, and his shrug is small enough as to barely move his mantle.

“What makes you think my entire being isn’t a perpetual facade?” he smiles, twinged with that same internal anger that she spotted earlier. “You have heard me use the… trappings of my mother’s religion. What of me is not pretend?”

“Your job? Your work?”

He brushes off the suggestions. “It’s all just… what I’ve been raised to do, isn’t it? Not based so much in faith as my mother’s faith, I suppose. She encouraged my interest in dunamancy, told me I could achieve anything I wanted to—and yet I wasn’t allowed access enough to do the research they thought might be fruitful.”

“That’s fucking stupid.” Beau snorts. “My dad always wanted me to take over his wine business, but he never let me do anything. I wanted to go travel, sell shit, and he shot me down.”

Essek smiles, and she has the strangest impulse to hug him. “Yes, it’s quite helpful when you acquiesce and they somehow still keep you from doing what you are told. Is that what made you decide to join the Cobalt Soul instead?”

Suddenly she realizes—he thinks this is her rebellion. This blue mantle that she wears—he doesn’t realize this was her punishment. “Oh. No… The Cobalt Soul are the ones my dad hired to kidnap me.”

Essek looks, to his credit, shocked. His mouth hangs open as she leans back, tries to brush off the wounds that are still there below the blue, crosses her arms and juts her chin out. “Yeah, I… I started smuggling the wine instead. Fuck his bottom line up. So he called them and they came and kidnapped me.”

A smile very slowly overtakes his face. “Ah, Beauregard, we are not so different after all.”

“I didn’t start a fucking war, buddy.”

“No, but would you have? Given the means? With the arrogance of feeling like you could get away with anything, before you knew better?”

She can’t deny that.

Because he’s an arrogant rich kid— _was_ an arrogant rich kid, before they steamrolled his life. And she’s been there. She just can’t pretend that she wouldn’t have done the same, given his position. 

She raises her glass and clinks it against his.

“To knowing better now,” she says, and he laughs.

“Ah yes. To being taught better.” He drinks, then looks at her. “That is why you are changed now, is it not? Because of them?”

She looks around at the group, still caught up in the nonsense display that Caleb and Frumpkin are putting on. Jester nearly in tears from laughing so hard, Fjord with his hands over his face in exasperation. They were the ones who found her, and even more than the rest, they are the ones who teach her enough to keep going now.

Her empty hand brushes against the tattoo on the back of her neck, too—it doesn’t feel like anything now that it’s healed, but she knows it’s there. Doesn’t let herself forget.

“Yeah. Because of them.”

They both drink again, in the silence that isn’t really silence—it’s filled with Jester’s laughter and Yasha’s incredulousness and Veth’s wonder. In that, she looks over at him. “Come with us. Just fucking leave.”

“I don’t know that I can, Beauregard.”

“No. Fuck that. You’ve got just as much choice as your brother does to go to Bazzoxan, or your father did to… you know, die.” He barely flinches at that, and she thinks maybe it is a deeper wound than she realizes. “You don’t have to stay here. Your mom’s ‘perfection’ doesn’t have shit to do with you.”

He smiles. “Oh, you have it backwards. My actions reflect on her parenting. And she…” he snorts, “she is a perfect individual. What would it say about her if I were to… go rogue?”

“What does it say about her that her son started the war?”

He doesn’t answer, just presses his drink to his mouth and stares intently at the cat.

“At some point you have to be a fucking person, Essek. You’re gonna disappoint your mom. And that’s fine. It’s not gonna fucking kill you.”

“You all seem to be close to death quite often.”

“Yeah, well,” she shrugs. “That has nothing to do with our parents. Shit all, in fact.” She holds out a hand. “We offered you a place here, with us. Do you want it or not?”

He looks down at the hand. “More than I have wanted anything in a very long time.”

“Then just fucking take it.”

“And what about Verin? What about my den?”

“Verin could probably use a better role model.” She brandishes her hand again, as if to push him to shake it. “Come the fuck on, Essek. What are you afraid of?”

His grin coils around the words stuck on his tongue—she can almost see them. “Everything that I have never been able to shed.”

“Then just let it go, man. She isn’t gonna change. This city isn’t gonna change. The world out there? It’ll change you. Come with us, just disappear without a trace. It’s a lot more freeing than you might think.”

Her hand is still extended there, and she thinks she’s gonna let him go if he doesn’t take it in the next five seconds. Cut him loose like a fish, Fjord might say. Or maybe he wouldn’t. She holds it for longer than that, and finally, finally, he takes it, almost daintily.

“Okay, first off, you gotta shake hands better,” she says. “I’ll show you how.”

“I’ll follow your lead,” he says, and his smile is absent of all of the self-deprecation, the pretension, the condescension his mother taught him. All that is left is joy.

She allows herself a moment to wonder what his mother’s faith is for, if this is what is left in its absence. And then she once again reaches out her hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this! I hope you enjoyed—let me know what you think!


End file.
